Overview

The components of the IITAC cluster were purchased from IBM over the Summer of 2005 and assembled by technical staff at the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing. It is a large scale facility consisting of 712 AMD Opteron 2.4GHz processors with a theoretical peak performance of 3.4 TFlops.

Operating system

Login

There are two e326 login nodes in the cluster, iitac01.tchpc.tcd.ie and iitac02.tchpc.tcd.ie. These nodes are also used for compiling and job submission.

Compute

There are 346 e326 compute nodes each containing two 2.4GHz AMD 64bit processors, 4GB RAM and a 80GB SATA scratch disk. Each node has dual onboard gigabit ethernet and a PCI-X infiniband card.

Interconnect

The nodes are connected to two Voltaire 288 port InfiniBand (IB) switches - providing a dedicate low latency high bandwidth interconnect for parallel jobs. The Voltaire technology allows for inter node communication speeds of up to 10Gb. The IB network is also used by our parallel file system. Each node is also connected to a Force10 Gigabit switch - providing a high speed dedicated management network.

Disk storage

IBM's General Parallel File System (GPFS) runs across all nodes on the cluster. The cluster is connected to our S2A9500 storage system from Data Direct Networks. Twelve e326 nodes are connected via two fibre channel switches to the DDN S2A9550. These twelve nodes operate as GPFS I/O servers. All other nodes connect to these twelve nodes as GPFS clients via the two Voltaire IB switches. 70TB of high performance storage, in a RAID 6 configuration, for home directories.

Node Specifications

Processors

2

Vendor

AMD

Model

Opteron 250

CPU Speed

2.4 Ghz

Cache size

L1 64Kb instruction, L1 64Kb data, L2 1024Kb

RAM

4GB DDR PC3200

Disk

80GB SATA

Ethernet

2 Broadcom BCM5704 Gigabit Ethernet

Funding and Acknowledgement

This infrastructure was funded by:

Users must acknowledge the support and infrastructure provided by the Trinity Centre for High Performance Computing and the IITAC project funded by the HEA under the Program for Research in Third Level Institutes (PRTLI) co-funded by the Irish Government and the European Union